78 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
Northern Caucasus, etc., the grain from thousands of hectares
and hundreds of barns has not yet been threshed and that no
special measures to carry out the threshing are apparently being
undertaken." Here again, according to the Pravda, the local
population is to blame. This last statement, incidentally,
confirms the allegation made long ago from the other side
that a large part of the last harvest could not be threshed and
in all probability could not even be garnered owing to the
destruction of draught cattle, the reduced amount of labour
available, and the disastrous position of transport. About the
same time Pravda published a very significant decree which
ran as follows: "It is decreed that the grain to be surrendered
by the people on the collective farms and by individual peasants
is to be taken only from an area determined for that purpose
in accordance with the plan and on the basis of the present
decree. It is further decreed that grain grown either by the
people on the collective farms or by individual peasants on
any area in excess of the plan shall not be collected by the
State." Why was this decree issued? Because the danger had
been recognized—as can be clearly read between the lines of
Pravda—that the hungry peasants thus deprived of their
crops would not carry out next year's spring sowing properly
by way of protest.
A decree of the Council of People's Commissaries and the
Central Committee of the party, published in Izvestia on
February 25,1934, shows clearly that in the winter of 1933-4
the members of many of the collective farms, so specially
favoured and privileged by the Government, were already
going hungry. The decree shows that in 1934 as well as in 1933
the peasants of the collective farms had been granted advances
in kind, not only for sowing purposes, but also for food. The
decree fixes the dates at which, after the next harvest, these
advances of grain were to be reclaimed. There can thus no
longer be any doubt that even the privileged peasants of the
collective farms were, in the winter of 1933-43 in a position